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Re: success and god

10/16/2005 6:53 AM
Kursad	Re: success and god This link has info about the argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorem It is interesting that it has caused theories about the human mind as crazy as polulating "quantum mechanical access" to the "platonic world of mathematical forms" (whatever that might be). Which sounds like the modern version of the "ghost in a machine" (the spirit that "flies" after you die) to me. I feel like there's something fishy going on around these theories, but I cant quite spot it exactly, but I think that the symbolic formalization of natual numbers mentioned in the theory is lacking something about the essence of the meaning of being a natural number. (Essentially what is says is that a natural number is something that has instances like ., .., ..., ...., and so on, in some fancy symbolic notation.) Similarly, any other application of formal logic might have similar consequences and one needs to be careful there. In both cases, (whether you are reasoning with your intuitions or formalizing everything mathematically and proving your arguments mathematically), both approaches are subject to error), and the symbolic representation may not capture the meaning. I dont know how sensible is the idea of postulating a quantum mechanical theory of mind just because some symbolic representation did not work and did not capture the human capacity of reasoning about the "formalized" phenomenon and could not "mechanize" it, so that a computer would be capable of doing the same. (Indeed, the computational theory of mind assumes exactly that - that human reasoning is merely computation and nothing else and there's no ghost in the machine.)

10/16/2005 6:53 AM

Kursad

Re: success and god

This link has info about the argument:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorem

It is interesting that it has caused theories about the human mind as crazy as polulating "quantum mechanical access" to the "platonic world of mathematical forms" (whatever that might be). Which sounds like the modern version of the "ghost in a machine" (the spirit that "flies" after you die) to me. I feel like there's something fishy going on around these theories, but I cant quite spot it exactly, but I think that the symbolic formalization of natual numbers mentioned in the theory is lacking something about the essence of the meaning of being a natural number. (Essentially what is says is that a natural number is something that has instances like ., .., ..., ...., and so on, in some fancy symbolic notation.) Similarly, any other application of formal logic might have similar consequences and one needs to be careful there. In both cases, (whether you are reasoning with your intuitions or formalizing everything mathematically and proving your arguments mathematically), both approaches are subject to error), and the symbolic representation may not capture the meaning. I dont know how sensible is the idea of postulating a quantum mechanical theory of mind just because some symbolic representation did not work and did not capture the human capacity of reasoning about the "formalized" phenomenon and could not "mechanize" it, so that a computer would be capable of doing the same. (Indeed, the computational theory of mind assumes exactly that - that human reasoning is merely computation and nothing else and there's no ghost in the machine.)